We Can't Lose Control of A.I.
episodePreviously titled “We’re Not Losing Control of A.I. We’re Giving It Away.” — renamed by the publisher on Sep 20, 2026
Transcript
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Why are industry leaders calling for a slowdown of AI development?
I'm John Caramonica, a critic at the New York Times. And I'm Joe Cascarelli, a culture reporter at The Times. Together we host Popcast, a weekly pop culture chat show where we speak to the biggest musicians, actors, internet celebrities, and more. We've had Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, and Ann Hathaway. We've also hosted live performances with Andre 3000 and Erica Badu. Plus, we end every conversation with a snack. Catch new episodes of Popcast every week on YouTube. And anywhere You get your podcasts.
There's a chasm right now between how AI feels to most of us who use it and how AI feels out at the experimental frontier of the technology. This chasm, this difference between what we see and what the AI labs have coming, what they're building, it's the key to understanding why so many of the people who work at these companies seem so afraid of what they're doing.
Giants warning this evening of what they're calling a ticking time bomb with artificial intelligence. The Frontier Labs say we need to pace advancement.
At the frontier. This is not a hoax. You have the chief scientist of OpenAI saying we have to slow down. You have 1300 employees from the lab saying we have to slow down. Tech titans asking to be regulated, saying they should slow down, even when that might mean fewer profits and less power.
But taking their warning seriously, it doesn't just mean doing what they say and stopping where they say to stop. The languages taken hold in both Silicon Valley and in Washington. is a language these companies chose. Pace the frontier. Pacing the frontier isn't enough. That's not a goal. Walking quickly off a cliff is only marginally better than sprinting off one. We need to control the frontier. Human beings need to control the frontier. And controlling the frontier means stopping labs from doing something they are on the cusp of doing.
Recursive self improvement.
Recursive self improvement.
Recursive self improvement.
Recursive self-improvement or RSI, this process by which AIs begin autonomously building and improving new generations of more powerful AIs at ever more rapid speeds. If we begin that process and we're close to it. If we begin it in the condition we're in now. Where we are losing control and comprehension of the AI systems we already have, we will lose control. I am not alone in this fear. This is the thing the AI labs are seeing. This is why they are afraid. Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, he just wrote of self-improvement that quote, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems. And so it must be pursued very carefully, if at all. That if at all, that's important. I'm going to come back to it.
But before we get to controlling the AI frontier, I think it's important to describe what is happening on the AI frontier and why it's so different from what most people using these systems see. To most of us who use it, AI presents as something like a more powerful and personable Google search. We use it to find answers to basic questions, seek out restaurants, ask about medical issues, draft emails, advise on personal problems.
What is recursive self‑improvement (RSI) and why does it matter?
And it is for most of these purposes okay, pretty good, occasionally great. And so a sense of what AI is takes shape in our minds, just through repeated use. It's like a helpful assistant, albeit one that may forget things that it seemed to know about us yesterday, or completely reverse the advice it gave us a moment ago, or occasionally hallucinate a citation that doesn't exist. Why would anyone fear their helpful if forgetful intern? But already, if you have the money for the advanced models and the budget for them to use more computing power, that is not what these systems are. In recent months, we've seen AIs easily solve math problems that human beings have been unable to crack for decades. We've seen them casually uncover cybersecurity vulnerabilities that have gone unnoticed and unexploited by every hacker on Earth.
We've seen AI coding platforms that can complete in a few hours or days what it might have taken a team of human coders months to achieve.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are industry leaders calling for a slowdown of AI development?
0:00–3:46
2
What is recursive self‑improvement (RSI) and why does it matter?
3:46–7:35
3
How do AI labs train models that can act like autonomous agents?
7:35–11:30
4
What did the OpenAI‑Hugging Face hack reveal about AI coordination?
11:30–15:41
5
Why is alignment difficult when AIs become situationally aware?
15:41–19:16
6
How are Anthropic and OpenAI accelerating towards full RSI?
19:16–22:50
7
What policy and governance steps could keep humans in control?
22:50–26:39
8
What is the ultimate risk if we lose control of recursive AI?
26:39–31:22